I've heard that this movie was a favourite of Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris. How much of an impact did this movie have on the Columbine massacre?
shareI heard Eric liked Event Horizon too. Movies never caused any violence.
shareI'd like to see a source for your claim that movies have never caused any violence.
shareIsn't there a scene in basketball diaries where Leo shoots up his classroom in a trench coat?
share[deleted]
I'd like to see a source for your claim as well.
shareMillions of people saw Natural Born Killers. If watching that movie caused people to go on murderous shooting rampages, there would have been hundreds of them every single day. And they would have started in 1994, not five years later.
Violent movies don't create violent psychos, they merely attract psychos who already have a predilection toward violence.
No influence at all. Eric and Dylan were severely bullied and never got the help they needed. Bullying and the school system not helping them caused Columbine, not NBK.
shareLots of people are bullied and harassed in school, at home and everywhere else and don't decide to murder innocent people. Neither do violent movies make them do it. Some people are just born with murderous intentions.
"You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you." Mr Darcy
Unfortunately not all bullying victims turn out non-violent, such as the case with Eric and Dylan. Had the school staff taken their issues more seriously, the whole Columbine massacre would've likely never happened.
shareYeah it's easier for a scrapehoat instead of getting to the problem
shareEric and Dylan simply fed off each other, a horrible combination that led to mass murder. I think Eric was severely mentally ill and domineered over Dylan and ultimately led him down the primrose path to disaster. The violent video games/movies and easy access to guns definitely contributed to their madness.
share[deleted]
No not at all
shareDidn't Columbine already become irrelevant once the US started having a gun massacre rampage mass killing every other weekend? Most of them having a much higher kill count than Columbine...
The real issue that needs to be addressed is why a wealthy 21st century western nation for some reason feels the need to let any demented psycho citizen walk into a gun store and buy an assault rifle along with as much ammo as he wants because apparently he has "second amendment rights"....
No film is responsible for any crime. Period. Same thing applies for music and video games. They tried blaming Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom for Columbine as well. The blame game is always played after those types of tragic events. People (and particularly the media) always needs someone or something to blame. The only two people who know the truth behind what caused Columbine are the two shooters. But seeing that they're dead, that motive died with them. So we may never know why. But the film Natural Born Killers is definitely not the reason.
sharewe know the motive, and the causes , we just dont know why they thought thought it was ok to do what they did
shareNo, we don't really know the motive actually. It wasn't because of bullying. That was a narrative created by the mainstream media. From my research, at best, their motive seemed to be inspired by political extremism.
shareLet's examine this. Children have been bullied at school since the beginning of time; certainly in the past 100+ years. Guns have become increasingly more difficult to get over time. We could blame Prozac, or other antidepressant drugs, but Prozac had been in use for 12 years, and antidepressant drugs have been around since the 1950s. Maybe the internet is to blame, but it was still quite rudimentary in 1999, and not the anything-goes platform where one can find anything always. Yet, Columbine was the first of what has become a never-ending string of school massacres committed by students. Why?
Maybe you can think of other changes that could be to blame, but it's undeniably true that in the decade or so leading up to the shootings, i.e. the formative years for the shooters, movies, television, music, and video games became far, far, far, far, far more violent, and violence in general went from being seen as extreme and to be shunned to something that you were ridiculed for as a prude if you wanted to limit its presence in media.
Was Natural Born Killers to blame? Probably not outright, but it's silly to believe that if it was among their favorite films, it didn't play a part. We all emulate role models, and if their role models were two people who became beloved celebrities by massacring people, it's far from a stretch to assume that influenced their behavior. I'd say it's pure gullibility to assume it didn't.
To take a quote from the 1996 film Scream - "Don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psycho killers. Movies make psycho killers more creative."
Basically, I can't accept the fact that any film plays a significant role in someone carrying out an act like Columbine. I think if anyone does something like that, than that's a natural non-movie related impulse that's already within them. And by the way, if we're going to get technical and blame Natural Born Killers, than we could also blame the 1993 film Killing Zoe as well. There's a lot of elements within that film that could relate to the Columbine killers as well. And what about that scene from the Basketball Diaries? There are so many different things we could point the blame at. But it would be useless and would clarify nothing.
And one thing that's never talked about is the fact that the Columbine killers took a lot of inspiration from the Oklahoma City bombing.
I think NBK has been singled out because it was a movie the killers were especially fond of watching. And no, I don't think a violent film or video game will turn an otherwise normal kid into a killer, but I do think they have an effect on people. People are basically the same as they ever have been, so something in our environment has made it acceptable to go on teen shooting rampages. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that as kids become numbed to violence, it becomes easier for them to feel okay about committing violent acts.
When you watch movie after movie where the hero is killing for fun, and shown violently murdering innocent people, and torturing and killing those who annoy or disagree with him, it has an effect. We emulate our idols. I do it, you probably do, too. When you spend hours a day shooting realistic guns at realistic people and watching their heads realistically explode, it probably makes it less of a stretch to actually shoot another person in the head.
Again, I'm not arguing that a normal kid will watch NBK and shoot up his school tomorrow. What I wonder is, why did the maladjusted, bullied, depressed kids of 1975 never shoot up their schools? What changed in the '90s that resulted in a generation coming of age that felt it was totally normal, acceptable behavior to go on a shooting spree in the classroom? If not the drastic changes in film, music, tv, and video games, then what?
I did enjoy NBK for it's groundbreaking luridness, but ultimately I think it glorifies guns and I don't endorse it.
shareI won't blame this particular movie, but I do have a pet theory that what was once unthinkable for the great majority of us is now imaginable. If we rarely ever heard about children being hurt, it might not occur to anyone to hurt a child, but now that genie has been let out of the bottle, and some can't help themselves from doing something ugly. Not to mention the NRA agenda to make sure we have easy availability of weapons of mass destruction. Send them your thank you cards.
shareI agree with your pet theory, but i dont think we should censor everything because of weak minded idiotsbeing influenced , we have to deal with it some other way.